I survey the blood on the counter and in the sink and the drops on the floor and point out to myself with the impeccable logic of the drunk and frazzled that there is more blood because I have been drinking and drinking thins the blood, before I remember that it is in fact Honey’s blood, and Honey hasn’t been drinking, only me. “If… if you could just bring me my bag I have some hand sanitizer and some wipes I can use to clean up.” Cindy looks at Honey, who has, thank sweet God above, restored some of her natural composure and is pointing at the little puddles of blood on the counter and saying “Dah! Dah! Dah!” and backs out of the bathroom. The sound of Honey’s cheery normal voice leaves me rubbery, the adrenaline flowing out like blood down the drain of a slaughterhouse. I perch Honey on my hip and hug her and say “What a good, brave girl, what a scary thing, so good and so brave.” She begins crying again but in a more controlled way when I try to look at the toilet paper to see if the blood has soaked through. A bird’s-eye inspection shows a bloom of blood on the inner layers, but none have breached the integrity of the outer layers.
I say “shhhhhhhh” to her and I smooth the damp hair down at the back of her head and across her forehead and she puts her head against my neck and then rears it back to smile into my face and say “Eeeeeh,” pointing at my chest and the blood all over my shirt and the skin of my neck with a tiny adult kind of concern, as though she’s saying “Oh dear, Mommy, you’ve soiled your shirt.” I look in the mirror and I see a murder victim, a mugshot, my hair a nest and blood everywhere. I wish Engin could see. I want to take a picture but it would be too cruel to send him. But just for me to remember, I fish my phone out of my pocket and take a gruesome portrait of mother with daughter.
Cindy is back at the door with the bag in one hand and the half of The Very Hungry Caterpillar in the other. I take the book first and set it on the counter away from the blood. I have been working to compose my face and as I reach for the bag I look at her and say “I’m so sorry—we crashed your and Ed’s date and then made this big fuss.” I smile with the corners of my mouth turned down ruefully and hope for an answering smile but she just says “Kids are hard” and I realize I don’t know whether she has any. I set Honey down on her feet and she holds on to my legs and puts her face between my knees. I get out the wipes from the bag and the hand sanitizer and I wipe away the blood and then squirt little plops of sanitizer down onto the counter. “You oughta think about a tetanus shot for her,” Cindy says, which unaccountably annoys me, of course she has had her damn shots, I even know the exact date because that’s the kind of thing I remember. “She had her second TDAP shot on the sixteenth of last month,” trying to sound authoritative. Honey raises her little arms to me and begins making her “heh heh heh” want-want-want sound and I pat her head and swiftly wipe away the last smear of blood from the bowl of the sink and run the faucet and pack away the wipes and the sanitizer and the half of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and pick up Honey and put her on my hip and kiss her hand and put her backpack over my shoulder and brush past Cindy who holds the door open. “Thank you,” I say. “I’ll just settle up.” When I exit the corridor into the restaurant the tables of patrons and the hostess look in my direction and I remember that I am covered in blood. The martyred Honey smiles a big smile and waves her wrapped-up mitt in the air and there is scattered applause for the baby. I want to disappear from the surface of the earth, I want soft merciful darkness to envelop Honey and me both. “Sorry about that,” I say to everyone, “We’re okay!” and walk in measured steps to the hostess stand where I give her my debit card and ask if I can pay for one Picon punch one greyhound and Ed and Cindy’s drinks plus tip, approximately thirty dollars down the slaughterhouse drain too. “Better stay out here, ha ha,” I tell her, because I am not setting foot back in the bar. Ed waves kindly from his seat. “They got a carpenter’s nail sticking out of that carpeting,” he says. “Must have snagged the finger on that.” “Did we get a little booboo,” says the hostess, who is a majestic figure of a woman nearly six feet tall with broad shoulders blond hair and weathered pink skin. Honey is now in full lover mode, smiling and then ducking her face toward my neck and peeking up through lashes. Thank God. “That’s what I get for bringing her into the bar, haha,” I say, and scuttle out after signing my slip and putting my card into my pocket. “We’ll get Emilio to hammer that down, anyone could just trip over it, imagine me and my sandals!” says the hostess to my retreating figure. “You okay to drive, hon?” Cindy calls from the table. “We walked here—it takes five minutes. Thanks for your help!” Big smile, big smile and wave to Cindy and Ed, big wave to the folks.
I pause in the anteroom with the little piano and put my back against the wall by the door, out of sight of the main dining room, and slump, a slump that translates itself to Honey, who puts her head on my shoulder and her injured paw on my other shoulder and inspects her new appendage. I smell her hair which has its puppy smell and then put her down to pack away my wallet her diaper shit and prepare us for maximum efficient travel on foot.
I carry her out the door down the concrete steps and into a vast lavender sky and hot dry air that saps the remaining vitality I had counted on to carry us home. We walk through the parking lot and stop at the road while a truck barrels past. My heart suddenly starts pounding. I picture myself and Honey under the wheels of the truck, all her bright red blood outside of her body, her limbs mangled, and start crying. She puts her hand on my face with her toilet paper mitten and I walk fast, nearing a run as we pass the railroad tracks. My arms are beginning to falter as we round the circle toward the house and I’m gasping for the last twenty-five yards and then finally we are inside and I’ve illuminated every lamp before I realize neither of us has eaten anything. After debating with myself for three minutes about how best to approach the wound I find Band-Aids in the medicine cabinet and steel my entire body and wet the toilet paper and ease it off, during which Honey screams, and more blood oozes. I wipe the flap with a Betadine wipe and she screams more and starts wiping the finger on my chest again, and the blood streams. “I can’t fucking do this again,” I say to the empty room, to no one. We go to the sink and wash the finger again, and she cries. But then, miracle, as though she’s already grasped the basics of what needs to happen, she actually holds out her finger for me to look at and wipe with some gauze and dab on some cream and more or less wrap a Band-Aid around it. What a smart baby. I put Saran Wrap around the mitt and affix it with a tiny strip of Scotch tape. I fix scrambled eggs. I cut an apple. Honey, smart baby, knows to eat with her other hand.
I give her a warm washcloth bath and take the Saran Wrap off. I hold her tight and we read The Little Blue Truck, which is about a truck that stops to help a mean dump truck when a bunch of farm animals leave the truck stranded in some mud. “This is not a good message,” I tell Honey. “Really we should help people even if they don’t deserve it.” That’s what Little Blue Truck was doing; whether the farm animals absorbed this lesson or not is unclear. But maybe Little Blue was just helping a fellow truck. I put her in the Pack ’n Play. I go on the porch to smoke a cigarette and remember for probably the third time today that I am married.
Honey looks so much like Engin, came out looking so much like him in the way that children are said to resemble their fathers for troubling evolutionary reasons. And even though I carried Honey and gave birth to her and nursed her and pour my life into her sometimes I look at her beautiful small face and wonder if I’m her mother. Then I try and feel for one moment what it would feel to be almost seven thousand miles away from her and I wonder that Engin has not boarded a plane and fought his way through a battalion of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers to be with her and a fury settles like a cloud of horseflies on the image of his face before I think this is a horribly unfair thought to have.